"The operation itself involves creating a thin flap on the eye, folding it to enable remodeling of the tissue beneath with a laser. The flap is repositioned and the eye is left to heal in the postoperative period."

During the operation, the muscles around both my eyes repeatedly seized, causing the eyeball-squeezing-clamps (I'm pretty sure that's the technical term) to pop out. As a result, both eyes hemorrhaged so badly that the entirety of the white in both my eyes was replaced by deep red and purple. When I returned to work a few days later, a coworker took one look at me and shrieked, "Oh my god!". A child at one of the tables I was waiting on began to whimper and then hid his face in his mother's sleeve.

To make things worse, I had to constantly worry about tearing my healing "eyeball flaps". I couldn't rub my eyes. I had to wear sunglasses whenever I went outside to avoid getting any sand or dirt in my eyeballs. In one particularly traumatizing episode, I was making sangria at work and I accidentally squeezed lime juice in my eye. I had to stand there, clenching my hands in front of my eyes, knowing that if I rubbed my burning eyeballs (as I desperately wanted to do) I might upset my delicate eyeflaps.

On the upside: once my eyes healed, I was left with perfect vision. This left me (who had spent a lifetime squinting through glasses and contact lenses) feeling like I'd been implanted with bionic eyes. That was pretty awesome.